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Incorporating the Transnational Adoptee Claudia Castaneda Race and reproduction have historically played a significant and even determining role in U.S. adoption policy and practice. To the extent that a child's belonging in a family is assumed to be the product ofbiological reproduction and blood ties, adoption remains a less valued, unnatural or at least unfamiliar way of generating family ties between children and adults. To put it in less normative and more inclusive terms, the tie between a child and its parents is not as easily assumed in the case of families generated through adoption as it is in the case of biological reproduction. And the means by which a child is united with adults through adoption includes not only adoption policy and practice but also cultural dimensions that include ways of conceiving those ties. Contemporary adoption policy and practice is explicitly organized around the idea that adoption must serve the "best interests of the child," a common phrase in the formulation of children's rights (e.g., at the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights ofthe Child). These "interests" have become a significant channel through which adults articulate their desires for children. Debates about adoption policy and practice organized around the child's "interests," furthermore, are certainlyabout current realities, with all their material and institutional constraints , but they are also about possible futures. In this essay, I read adoption debates with regard to the visions of the future that they offer, paying close attention in particular to the ways that the child adoptee is variously mobilized in these debates, and suggesting that the child adoptee becomes the terrain on which the adoption debate is carried out and so too the terrain through which possible futures are imagined. Transracial adoption emerges as a key issue in this debate, such that the visions projected through the adoptee are also variously racial futures. Because transnational adoptions have been undertaken at least since World War II and in significant numbers since the 1970s and 1980s, these futures may also be global. How, then, are these futures articulated and materialized in relation to the child in adoption debates? Adoption as a Reproductive Technology: An Overview For the purposes of this discussion, I understand adoption as a reproductive technology, to call on a series of associations between technology and reproduction that bring togi!ther human reproduction, the reproduction ofbodies in 277 278 Imagining Adoption many different material forms, and the generation of cultural meanings. This set of associations has been made in recent feminist work in anthropology, cultural studies, and science studies.! Here, nature has been brought into cultural analysis. It has been denaturalized and deconstructed. No longer the assumed substratum of culture, nature has become a question rather than a grounding for feminist cultural studies. Reproduction, from this perspective, belongs neither to culture nor to nature but requires the inextricable mix of the two. The body generated through reproductive technologies, accordingly, is never simply a body but is generated through technologies of embodiment that render its very materiality as well as its meanings. The reproductive technologies identified as significant in the generation of bodies in contemporary analyses include not only new reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), abortion, and artificial insemination, but also visual, legal, and textual technologies as disparate as ultrasound, photography, and advertising. The images, texts, and metaphors of the body generated by these technologies are as significant as the body's more strictly biological incarnations. They, too, replicate, modify, and transform the bodies that we live and know. Indeed, these technologies are inextricably implicated in generating natural facts about bodies, such that the two cannot be easily dissociated. Feminist science studies has observed not only that "every technology is a reproductive technology"2 but also that every body is reproduced by many different kinds of technologies.3 Adoption figures among the technologies conjoined in the generation of families and is itself arguably a form of assisted reproduction. In this essay, I focus on adoption not only as a reproductive technology but, even more specifically , as a reproductive technology of race. Race has historically been naturalized in the biological sciences, at least since the nineteenth century, as a property of the body that, along with other naturalized attributes, such as sex, intelligence , sanity, and sexuality, constitutes the human. Just as a body is generated by means ofvarious technologies, the body's race does not simplyexist; the body is racialized. Furthermore, a historically informed analysis of race suggests that...

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